Student lands place at CERN

STAR STUDENT: Joshua Dawes, a former Nelson and Colne College student, has bagged himself a prestigious placement at an internationally renowned labaratory in Geneva (S)

Published:15:56Wednesday 18 February 2015

A university student is on cloud nine after beating tough competition to land a prestigious placement.

Former Shuttleworth College student Joshua Dawes will be heading to Geneva in July as a Technical Student at one of the world’s leading centres for computer science and physics research CERN. The 20-year-old, who attended Nelson and Colne College, will complete his own project and work with a team of computer scientists at the CMS Experiment, which is part of the world-renowned Large Hadron Collider during his year abroad.

The CMS detector itself has a mass of approximately 12,500 tonnes, twice as heavy as the Eiffel tower, and along with the ATLAS Experiment, helped to discover the Higgs’ Boson – otherwise known as the God Particle.

Joshua will write tools which allow physicists to interact with the system by giving instructions as “code”; the system will then interpret the instructions and display and manage the data accordingly.

Joshua, who is reading computer science and mathematics at the University of Manchester, said: “To get into CERN is amazing, my dream job really, but then to find out that I would be working on the LHC is quite brilliant.

“The experience of working on the CMS experiment on the LHC before I’ve graduated from university is an achievement I won’t easily top.

“I’m looking forward to living in Geneva and seeing the Lake and Alps, and working at the CERN site, which is a small city in itself. Since the LHC is running at full energy for the first time in 2015, software I work on will handle data that will help physicists to write new physics – I really can’t wait.”

CERN only accept around 100 students per year, and Nelson and Colne College staff said they are thrilled with Joshua’s news.